F.A.O. Schwarz Jr., former chief counsel for the Church Commission, and more than a dozen former congressional aides urged Congress to appoint a special panel to examine the secretive operations of the CIA and the National Security Agency and their impact on Americans' civil liberties.

Defense Intelligence Agency chief Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn told the House Intelligence Committee that his agency has to assume that former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden took every document he accessed, and that much of it concerned Pentagon programs.

A pilot project is part of NSA's push to layer commercial technologies and standards on top of one another to achieve security goals more quickly. This approach would replace the government-specific IT solutions that can take years and millions of dollars to develop.

Gen. Keith Alexander, head of the U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, said the greatest impact of the ongoing government shutdown on cybersecurity is on the morale of the cyber workforce.

The bill would conform, mostly, with the House's most recent Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. Both the House and Senate bills are trying to find common areas to incentivize private sector companies to share information on any malicious code their firms encounter, both by providing them with liability protections that would shield them from lawsuits that could otherwise follow from sharing information with competitors or with the government, and by convincing them that federal agencies are capable of securely communicating threat information between the private and public sectors.

While the threat of a Sept. 11-style attack may not be as great, terrorism, either of the lone-wolf or state-sponsored variety, still poses a threat to the U.S. Agencies are moving to protect themselves in areas such as cybersecurity.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence said the lead agencies under the IC IT Enterprise program launched a standard desktop, a secure community cloud and an apps store in mid-August. Al Tarasiuk, the assistant DNI and intelligence community chief information officer, said the key to this effort was having an ICwide agreed-upon security architecture and policies.

The National Security Agency on Thursday disputed a published report that secret intelligence budget files provided by agency leaker Edward Snowden show that the surveillance agency warned in 2012 that it planned to investigate up to 4,000 cases of possible internal security breaches.

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board is responsible for investigating the balance between counterterrorism security and Americans' privacy. The board is working toward a report on the National Security Agency's surveillance programs.